Michael Popielarski Michael's Brick Pointing Ruined our house with water damage after stucco repair/replacement Philadelphia Pennsylvania

We hired Michael’s Brick Pointing to re-do the stucco on the back side of our townhouse we are renting out at (((REDACTED))) in Philadelphia.

Michael called on Friday, July 21, 2017 and stated that the stucco was finished, but wanted $2,000 in addition for waterproof coat application. We thought it was a lot for just coating, but agreed to this. He said he would do the coat application the following Monday. That Saturday, July 22, we got a call from our tenant family, who had just returned from a vacation, saying that something must have gone terribly wrong with the stucco, because rainwater was coming into the house from around all the windows onto the floors, and second floor ceiling was wet and cracked from water damage. Water was all over the hardwood floors.

To make the long story short, the water leak detection company found that the stucco installation was not done properly to make the walls water-tight; roof-to-stucco transition and stucco-to-window transition are defective. Michael tried to blame this on our roof, which was installed in 2009 and had never caused water damage before and also on the windows on all 3 floors on the back side of our house. These windows were installed at separate times by different vendors (upper floors in 2009 and lower floor in 2013) and had never leaked prior to the stucco work.

We had to hire a new contractor, McNamara Masonry, to remove Michael’s stucco entirely and re-do it in the second week of August, 2017.

The stucco back wall is finally water-tight with no problems.

Michael’s Brick Pointing has refused to refund the money that we paid him to install the stucco.

He also lied about the waterproof coating, because he claimed that he did the coating on Monday, July 24, 2017 and wanted more money.

The tenant family reported that no coating was done on 7/24, and the scaffolding had already been taken down, when they got home on Sat, 7/22.

I hope this never happens to anybody else’s home in the future.